The Dalit scholar, jurist, and political leader who designed the Indian constitution, mounted the most powerful intellectual challenge to Gandhi's approach to caste, converted to Buddhism with hundreds of thousands of followers, and whose arguments about structural inequality and the limits of reform from within remain the foundational texts of Dalit liberation thought.
Ambedkar was born an untouchable in 1891 — at the bottom of a caste hierarchy that determined everything about his life before he had lived any of it. He became a lawyer, an economist, and the architect of the Indian constitution. He argued that Gandhi's approach to untouchability would preserve caste while appearing to challenge it. In 1956, weeks before his death, he led 600,000 followers in converting from Hinduism to Buddhism. Contemporary Dalit rights movements draw more on Ambedkar than on Gandhi — and the conflict between their legacies is a live political fault line in India today.